Alkaline earth metals and alkali metals are almost invariably found in an oxidized state as a component of metallo-organic salts due to the highly reactive nature of such elements. Salts of such metal-ions are widely distributed throughout nature. The distribution and relative abundance of various metal ions varies greatly, from very common elements such as calcium, magnesium, potassium and sodium to less common elements such as strontium, barium, lanthanum and gallium and very rare elements such as rubidium, caesium and beryllium.
Salts of alkaline earth metal and alkali metal compounds are used in a great number of industrial processes and in production of food products, medical products, pharmaceutical ingredients, vitamins and other health related products, products for personal care, as well as for a number of industrial products such as fertilizers, building materials, glass, iron and steel manufacture and in a great number of other products. Thus, efficient manufacture of pure metallo-organic salts is of enormous commercial interest.
For many of the practical uses of alkaline earth metals, specific salts must be manufactured, which possess the properties required for the desired application. Of particular interest for the present invention are situations where the metal-ion salts must be manufactured with high purity and with organic counter-ions not found in nature. Manufacture of such salts is generally made by various aqueous processes and it is in general difficult to control the homogeneity and purity of the reaction products necessitating re-crystallizations and other purification steps, which in turn results in low yields of the desired salt as appears from Briggman B & Oskasson (1977), Schmidbaur H et al. (1989) and Schmidbaur et al. (1990).